Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

by Mo Yan

  The Mid-Autumn banquet was held under the apricot tree, with moon cakes, watermelon, and a variety of fine dishes arrayed on the table. Your father sat at the north end, with me crouched beside him. You and Chunmiao sat to the east, opposite Baofeng and Gaige. Kaifang and Huzhu sat to the south. The moon, perfectly round, sent its rays down on the Ximen family compound. The old tree had all but died years earlier, but in lunar August, a few new leaves appeared on some of the branches. Your father flung a glassful of liquor up toward the moon, which shuddered; the beams suddenly darkened, as if a layer of mist had shrouded the face of the moon. But only for a moment; the new light was brighter, warmer, and cleaner than before. Everything in the compound — the buildings, the trees, the people, and the dog — seemed to be steeped in a bath of light blue ink.

  Your father splashed the second glassful on the ground. He poured the third glassful down my mouth. It was a dry red wine that Mo Yan had asked a German master winemaker friend to make. Deep red in color, with a wonderful bouquet and a slightly bitter taste, when it touched my throat it brought a host of memories.

  It was Chunmiao’s and my first night as husband and wife, and our hearts were so full of emotions sleep would not come. We were bathed by moonlight streaming in through the cracks. We lay naked on the kang my mother and Hezuo had both slept on, staring at each other’s face and body as if for the first time. “Mother, Hezuo,” I said in silent benediction, “I know you are watching us. You sacrificed yourselves to bring happiness to us.

  “Chunmiao,” I called out softly, “let’s make love. When Mother and Hezuo see that we are in perfect harmony, they will be able to move on, knowing all is well. . . .”

  We wrapped our arms around each other and began to move in the moonlight like fish tumbling in the water. We made love with tears of gratitude in our eyes. Our bodies seemed to float up and out the window, all the way to the moon, with countless lamps and the purple ground far below. There we saw: Mother, Hezuo, Huang Tong, Qiuxiang, Chunmiao’s mother, Ximen Jinlong, Hong Taiyue, Ximen Bai. . . They were all sitting astride white birds, flying into a void we could not see. Even Ma Gaige’s lost arm, dark as an eel, was following in their wake.

  Late that night your father led me out of the compound. By this time there was no doubt that he knew who I was. On our way out we stood in the gateway and, feeling intense nostalgia, yet seemingly with no wistfulness at all, took a long look inside. Then we headed out to the plot of land, where the moon hung low waiting for us.

  When we reached the one-point-six-acre plot of land, which seemed to us to have been carved out of gold, the moon began to change color, first to a light eggplant purple, and then, slowly, into an azure hue. At that moment, everything around us took on an ocean blue that merged perfectly with the vast sky; we were two tiny creatures at the bottom of that ocean.

  Your father lay down in the hole he had dug. Softly, he said:

  “You can go, too, Master.”

  I walked over to my plot and jumped in. I fell, down and down, all the way to the hall where blue lights flashed. The underworld attendants were whispering back and forth. The face of Lord Yama, seated in the main hall, was unfamiliar to me. But before I could open my mouth, he said:

  “Ximen Nao, I know everything about you. Does hatred still reside in your heart?”

  I hesitated momentarily before shaking my head.

  “There are too many, far too many, people in the world in whose hearts hatred resides,” Lord Yama said sorrowfully. “We are unwilling to allow spirits who harbor hatred to be reborn as humans. Unavoidably, some do slip through the net.”

  “My hatred is all gone, Great Lord!”

  “No, I can see in your eyes that traces of it remain,” Lord Yama said, “so I will send you back once more as a member of the animal kingdom. This time, however, you will be reborn as a higher species, one closer to man, a monkey, if you must know, and only for a short time — two years. I hope that during those two years you will be able to purge your heart of hatred. When you do that, you will have earned the right to return to the realm of humans.”

  In accordance with Father’s wishes, we spread the wheat and beans in his room, as well as the corn hanging from the rafters, into his grave, covering his face and body with those precious grains. We spread some of it into the dog’s grave as well, though that was not spelled out in Father’s last wishes. We wrestled with one item for a while, but ultimately decided to part with Father’s wishes by erecting a marker over his grave. The words were written by Mo Yan and cut into stone by the stone mason from my donkey era, Han Shan:

  Everything that comes from the earth shall return to it.

  Book Five

  An End and a Beginning

  54

  The Face of the Sun

  Dear reader, this would seem to be the logical place to wrap up this novel, but there are characters whose fates have not yet been revealed, something most readers want to see. So let’s give our narrators, Lan Jiefang and Big-head, a rest and let me — their friend Mo Yan — pick up the threads and pin a tail on this lumbering animal of a story.

  After Lan Jiefang and Pang Chunmiao buried his father and the dog, they entertained the thought of living out their days working Father’s plot of land in Ximen Village; unfortunately, a highly respected guest arrived at the Ximen family compound. It was a man named Sha Wujing, who had attended the provincial Party school with Jiefang and was now Party secretary of the Gaomi County Party Committee. Deeply moved by Jiefang’s life experience and the decrepit condition of the once illustrious Ximen family compound, he said generously to Jiefang:

  “You’ll never regain your position as deputy county chief, my friend, and restoring your membership in the Party is unlikely. But I think we can find you a government job to keep you going.”

  “I’m grateful for the thoughtful consideration of our leaders, but there’s no need for that,” Jiefang replied. “I’m the son of a Ximen Village peasant, and this is where I want to live out my days.”

  “Remember the old Party secretary Jin Bian?” Sha asked. “Well, here’s what he had in mind. He and your father-in-law Pang Hu are good friends, and if you two were to move into town, you could look after your father-in-law. The Standing Committee has approved your assignment as assistant director of the Cultural Exhibition Center. As for Comrade Chunmiao, she can return to the New China Bookstore if she’s willing. If not, we can find something else for her.”

  Dear reader, returning to town was not something Jiefang and Chunmiao ought to have considered; but the opportunity to be working for the government and to look after her aging father was too good to pass up. Keep in mind that those two friends of mine were ordinary people not blessed with the ability to look into the future. They returned to town without delay. Since it was ordained by Fate, they could not have done otherwise.

  At first they moved into Pang Hu’s house. Although he had once publicly, even heroically, disowned Chunmiao, he was, after all, a loving father, an old and ailing man, like a candle guttering in the wind, so he grew teary and his heart softened, especially after learning how difficult life had been for his daughter and the man who was now her legal husband. He put the ill will of the past aside, threw open his door, and welcomed them into his house.

  Early each morning Jiefang rode his bicycle to the Cultural Exhibition Center. Given the cheerless, shabby layout of the center, assistant director was a title, not a job. There was nothing for him to “direct,” and all he did all day long was sit at his three-drawer desk, drinking weak tea, smoking cheap cigarettes, and reading the newspaper.

  Chunmiao decided to return to the children’s section of the New China Bookstore, where she dealt with a new generation of boys and girls. By then the clerks she’d worked with before had retired, their places taken by young women in their twenties. Chunmiao also rode a bicycle to work; in the afternoon she’d swing by Theater Street to buy chicken gizzards or sheep’s head meat to take home for her father to enjoy with th
e little bit of liquor he and Jiefang, neither of whom could handle much alcohol, drank before dinner. They’d talk about little things, like brothers.

  Chunmiao discovered she was pregnant around lunar New Year’s. Jiefang, who was in his fifties, was overjoyed. The news also brought tears to the eyes of Pang Hu, who was approaching eighty. Both men envisioned the joy of life with three generations living under one roof. But that image would quickly fade in the face of a looming disaster.

  Chunmiao had bought some stewed donkey meat on Theater Street and was on her way home, singing happily to herself as she turned into Liquan Boulevard, where a Red Flag sedan coming from the opposite direction ran into her. The bicycle was turned into junk, the meat splattered on the ground, and she flew over to the side of the road, where she hit her head on the curb. She died before Jiefang arrived on the scene. The car that had hit her belonged to Du Luwen, onetime secretary of the Lüdian Township Party Committee, now deputy head of the county People’s Congress; it was driven by the son of one of Ximen Jinlong’s youthful pals, Young Tiger Sun.

  I simply do not know how to describe what Jiefang felt when he saw her lying there; great novelists have set too high a standard in dealing with such traumatic moments.

  Jiefang buried Chunmiao’s ashes in his father’s notorious plot of land, near Hezuo’s grave site; no marker was placed at the head of either grave. After weeds grew around Chunmiao’s grave, you could not tell them apart. Pang Hu died not long after his daughter was buried. Jiefang took the urns containing both his and Wang Leyun’s ashes back to Ximen Village and buried them next to his father, Lan Lian.

  A few days later, Pang Kangmei, who was serving a prison term, went slightly mad and stabbed herself in the heart with a sharpened toothbrush. Chang Tianhong retrieved her ashes and went to see Lan Jiefang. “She was, after all, a member of your family,” he said, and Jiefang understood what he was trying to say. He took the ashes back to Ximen Village and buried them behind the graves of her parents.

  55

  Lovemaking Positions

  Lan Kaifang rode his father, my friend Jiefang, over to the house on Tianhua Lane on his motorcycle. The sidecar was filled with his daily necessities. This time, instead of holding on to the metal bar, Jiefang wrapped his arms around his son’s waist. Kaifang was still very thin, but straight and strong as an unbending tree branch. My friend wept all the way from the Pang house to 1 Tianhua Lane; his tears wetted the back of his son’s police uniform.

  He was understandably emotional as he stepped in through the gate for the first time since the day he’d left it supported by Chunmiao. The limbs of the parasol tree in the yard had reached the wall, with branches reaching over to the other side. As the old saying goes, “If trees can change, why can’t people?” But my friend had no time to ponder such thoughts, for he’d no sooner stepped into the yard than he saw through the gauzy covering of an open window in the east-side room, which had once been his study, a familiar figure. It was Huzhu, sitting there making paper cutouts, oblivious to all around her.

  No question about it, this had been Kaifang’s doing, and my friend realized how lucky he was to have such a kind and considerate son. Not only did he bring his aunt and his father together, he also took Chang Tianhong, who had fallen into a depression, back to Ximen Village on his motorcycle to meet Baofeng, who’d been a widow for many years. He had once, long ago, been the man of her dreams, and he’d always had feelings for her. Her son, Gaige, was not a man with great ambitions; rather he was an honest, upright, hardworking peasant. He was happy to approve the marriage of his mother to Chang Tianhong, so they could live out their lives as a contented couple.

  My friend Jiefang’s first love had been Huang Huzhu — to be fair, it was her hair he’d fallen in love with, and now, after lives marked by sadness and pain, the two of them were able to walk through life together. Kaifang spent most of his nights in a dormitory room and seldom came home to the house on Tianhua Lane, not even on weekends, owing to the demands of his job. That left only Jiefang and Huzhu in the house; they slept in their own rooms but ate their meals together. Huzhu, who’d never had much to say, spoke even less now, and when Jiefang asked her something, she replied only with a weak smile. For six months or so that is how things went, and then everything changed.

  After dinner one spring evening, as a light rain fell outside, their hands touched while they were clearing the table. Something happened to their mood; their eyes met. Huzhu sighed. My friend did too. In a soft voice, Huzhu said:

  “Why don’t you come in and comb my hair. . . .”

  He followed her into her room, where she handed him her comb and carefully removed her heavy hairnet. Her miraculous hair fell like waves all the way to the floor. For the first time in his life my friend was able to touch hair that he had admired from afar since his youth. A delicate citronella fragrance filled his nostrils and reached deep down into his soul.

  Huzhu took several steps forward in order to let her hair out all the way, and when her knees touched the bed, my friend scooped up her hair in one arm and with great care and great tenderness began to comb. In fact, her hair did not need to be combed; thick and heavy and slippery, it never had split ends; it would be accurate to say that he was stroking it, fondling it, sensing it. His tears fell on her hair like drops of water splashing on the feathers of Mandarin ducks, and rolled off onto the floor.

  With an emotional sigh, Huzhu began taking off her clothes, while my friend stood back several feet, holding her hair like a child carrying the train of a bride as she enters the church and staring wide-eyed at the scene before him.

  “I guess we ought to give your son what he wants, don’t you think. . . .”

  As his tears flowed freely, he parted the hair he was holding, like a man walking through the hanging branches of a weeping willow, not stopping until he’d reached his destination. Huzhu knelt on the bed to await his arrival.

  The scene was replayed several dozen times, until my friend said he would like to make love facing her. She replied in a voice devoid of feeling:

  “No, this is how dogs do it.”

  56

  Monkey Show in the Square

  Shortly after the first day of 2000, two humans and one monkey appeared in the square in front of the Gaomi train station. I’m sure, dear reader, that you have already guessed that the monkey was the latest reincarnation of Ximen Nao, following the donkey, the ox, the pig, and the dog. Naturally, it was a male monkey, and not one of those cute little things we’re so used to seeing. It was a large rhesus monkey, whose coat was a dull green-gray, sort of like dry moss. His eyes, far apart and sunk deep into their sockets, gave off a frightful glare. His ears lay flat against his head like fungi, his nostrils flared upward, and his open mouth, seemingly without an upper lip, showed nothing but teeth; that alone was enough to frighten anyone off. He was dressed in a red sleeveless jacket, turning a savage monkey into a comical one. Truth is, there’s no reason to call him either savage or comical, since a monkey in human clothes is just that and nothing more.

  A chain around the monkey’s neck was attached to the wrist of a young woman. I don’t need to tell you, dear reader, that the young woman in question is our long-lost Pang Fenghuang, and that the young man with her was the long-lost Ximen Huan. Both were wearing filthy down coats over tattered blue jeans and dirty knockoff sneakers. Fenghuang had dyed her hair a golden yellow and plucked her eyebrows, leaving only thin arcs. She wore a gold ring in her right nostril. Ximen Huan had dyed his hair red and had a silver ring above his right eye.

  Gaomi had come a long way by then, though it still didn’t compare favorably with the big cities. There’s a saying that goes: “The bigger the woods, the more diverse the bird population; the smaller the woods, the fewer the birds.” These two strange birds and their ferocious monkey attracted an immediate crowd of curious gawkers, as well as at least one busybody who ran to the local police station to report what was going on.

  The crowd inst
inctively formed a circle around Ximen Huan and Pang Fenghuang, which is what they wanted. He pulled a bronze gong out of his backpack and struck it — bong bong— which attracted even more people and tightened the circle. One sharp-eyed person in the crowd recognized the youngsters, but all the others were staring wide-eyed at the monkey and couldn’t have cared less who his handlers were.

  While Ximen Huan rhythmically beat the gong, Fenghuang took the chain off her wrist to give the monkey more room to maneuver, and then removed a straw hat, a tiny carrying pole, two tiny baskets, and a tobacco pipe from her backpack, laying them on the ground beside her. Then, to the rhythm of Ximen Huan’s gong, she began to sing in a raspy but melodious voice. The monkey took that as his cue to stroll around the square. It was a stumbling gait, since his legs were bowed; his tail dragged on the ground behind him as he glanced all around.

  The bronze gong rings out bong bong bong

  I tell monkey to do nothing wrong

  He received the Tao on Mount Emei

  And returned home as king of his trade, truly strong

  He’ll perform for our countrymen

  Who will pay for my song

  “Move back! Clear the way!” Newly assigned deputy station chief Lan Kaifang elbowed his way through the crowd. He was born to be a cop. In two years on the force he had acquitted himself so well that at the unprecedented young age of twenty he’d been picked as deputy chief of the train station police substation, one of the most crime-ridden areas in town. It was a ringing affirmation of his talent and dedication.

  Be an old man with a straw hat and pipe

  Stroll round the square, hands in back, walking along

  As she sang, Fenghuang tossed the straw hat to the monkey, who nimbly put it on his head. Next she tossed him the pipe; he jumped up and put it in his mouth. That done, he clasped his hands behind his back, bent at the waist, and bowed his legs; with his head rocking from side to side and his eyes darting, he looked like an old man out for a stroll, and was rewarded with laughter and applause.